by Cris Beam
Allyson ignored her. Anthony’s and Allen’s adoptions still hadn’t been formalized, despite the latest promise of the prior November. Allyson told me the boys’ maternal aunt had suddenly turned up, wanting to take the kids, “but the courts said no way. They’re staying here.”
The surprise appearance of a biological family member had stalled things and inspired the judge to ask that one last newspaper ad be placed for the biological mom since her rights, at least for Anthony, had not been terminated. The mom hadn’t responded to the ad, Allyson said, and the termination would happen in three days. And then, finally, the adoption proceedings could really begin. Allyson sighed. “I’ve had to become more faithful since the kids came to me.”
I know, I told her; I’d seen it.
Even Allyson’s grandmother, who always featured strongly in her dreams, was now delivering more direct religious communication. “The other night, I had a dream where my grandmother brought me a black box and on it was written ‘Romans 4:6–16.’ I didn’t know this verse,” she said, settling back into the couch. Fatimah had come back into the living room with her mother’s artwork wrapped and bagged, and she perched on the edge of the loveseat. Allyson stared hard at Fatimah. “At the time of the dream, I was very worried about this or that child running away.”
Fatimah didn’t flinch. The verse was about Abraham, Allyson explained. “The verse said that righteousness doesn’t come to you by what you do; it comes to you by faith. Against all hope, Abraham became the father of many nations,” she said. Anthony squirmed, overheating in his coat. “That freed me up to know that I can continue in my faith, and God will handle the work. My calling is to have faith and to take care of the children in that way.”
Allyson noticed Anthony and scooped him up. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go pick Sekina and Charles and Bruce and Jaleel up from school.”
She waited at the front door for Fatimah and me to go out before her; it was clear we wouldn’t be staying in the house alone. As we bent to gather our things, Fatimah whispered, “How’s she gonna pick Sekina up when she’s on her way here? How come she doesn’t see that in her dreams?”
It was true; as soon as we hit the stoop, we saw Sekina on the corner, her hair newly bleached white and pink and shaved up the back of her head. Fatimah ran up to her, happily shrieking her name.
“Her hair looks horrible,” Fatimah said, once Allyson had pulled away and Sekina had disappeared again around the corner. She pulled out her cell phone to show me the dozens of Twitter messages the two had been exchanging all day, as well as the night before. A few were from two in the morning. “Sekina didn’t come home last night, and she wasn’t in school. How’s she in school if she’s on Twitter with me all the time?” Fatimah was thirsty and she paused to take a sip from a grapefruit juice I had in my bag. She’d never tasted grapefruit juice before. “Ugghh! That’s disgusting! Anyway, how are Miss Green’s dreams real if she doesn’t know about her own daughter?”
It was a complaint I’d heard often, from Fatimah, Dominique, and Tonya: they said Sekina also snuck out and broke house rules, but because she was a biological daughter, her parents looked the other way. I never knew how much jealousy was tingeing these grievances, but I had certainly seen Sekina flaunting her status. In any case, Fatimah believed all of Allyson’s dreams were lies, manufactured to elevate anxiety in her children and keep them in line.
Fatimah’s loss of faith in Allyson’s integrity was only part of the reason she ran away. The final straw came when both Bruce and Allyson forgot the anniversary of her adoption.
“On June seventeenth, the day I had been adopted in the previous year, they didn’t even remember it. They didn’t say anything about me, about it, or anything. That’s the anniversary and you don’t remember that? So that’s the day I ran away,” Fatimah said. “My friend, she told me about a quick way to get money. It was during Regents week, and I would have done so good if I had gone, but I didn’t.”
The Regents are the state examinations that every New York high schooler must pass to be granted a diploma and considered for college. They’re administered in June, August, and January, and by the time Fatimah and I met, she had missed every one.
By this point we’d hailed a cab and were heading toward the ritzier part of DeKalb, in Fort Greene, to a South African restaurant Fatimah had been to once. Fatimah lowered her voice, so the driver couldn’t hear. For those missing six months, Fatimah had gotten herself into heartbreaking trouble, which she now doesn’t want to talk about anymore. When she did talk about it that day, her voice was monotone, her former lisp almost entirely gone.
I must have looked sad as Fatimah spoke, because she told me not to make her cry. “You’re supposed to pretend that it’s OK,” she said. “What I do is: everything that robs me I smile about it. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life. It stops me from crying. It stops me from getting mad or angry. I always smile and laugh and try to make people happy.”
When Fatimah got sick of the trouble she’d found, she called her mother.
“I guess I missed her,” she said. Or she missed the idea of her. When Fatimah’s mom said, “I know you been going through something; why don’t you come and stay with me?” she took it as a sign. Maybe her mom had changed; she’d been sober for eight years, though Fatimah conceded she’d relapsed the year before. And maybe this was the chance to save her little sister, Kimberly, who was eight years old and lived at home. At least, with Kimberly, she’d have something to live for.
Fatimah pulled out her phone to show me a picture of Kimberly. She said their mother was either depressed or barking orders, and both were ineffective at getting Kimberly to bed on time or to do her homework. Fatimah felt it was up to her to get food in the cupboards and to walk Kimberly to and from her elementary school; she’d recently applied for food stamps because her mother had been too depressed to bother. She also had to prod her mother to attend her AA and NA meetings because, after the relapse, ACS was closely monitoring the family.
“You know, I had plans but it’s hard for me to—I’m struggling with money,” Fatimah said. She hadn’t been back to high school in months but planned to re-enroll in February. She didn’t want to write her book anymore, now that it didn’t have such a happy ending, but she was still interested in becoming a writer; her newest idea was to create her own magazine about international families. “My intention is to travel across the world to report on how families live in Afghanistan, how families live in Uruguay. It’ll be a magazine about the different kinds of chances people take.”
But for now, Fatimah had to focus on more immediate crises. “I have to feed Kimberly. I have to feed myself and, like, make sure that everybody’s happy. That’s why I go crazy,” Fatimah said, playing with her new hair weave that cascaded to her shoulders. “Sometimes I just want to go in the bathroom and cry, but it’s like I told my little sister: don’t ever cry.”
Fatimah felt bad about dispensing this last bit of sisterly advice. “Now, when she gets hit, she laughs about it. In class, the teacher says, ‘Stop talking,’ and she laughs. When she’s yelled at, she thinks it’s funny. And now they really want her to go into a facility for it because she’s acting so crazy.”
Fatimah had been worried about other things too. The other day, she said, she caught Kimberly torturing the dog. She had dragged him into the bathtub and was burning him with the tap water. She also found Kimberly sifting through porn on the Internet, which Fatimah thought was a little intense for eight years old.
But Fatimah didn’t have many places to turn for help. ACS was the only agency she knew of with resources for kids, and she viewed them as a terrorizing force, one that had pushed her through twenty-one bad homes and was casing the apartment as we spoke. If Fatimah talked to anybody official, they’d likely tip off ACS. Fatimah’s biological mother was no help; she was teetering on her own kind of edge. And her adoptive mother, Fatimah felt, didn’t have any answers either. Since Fatimah had left D
eKalb, Fatimah said, Allyson never called her, even though she had left her new phone number several times.
“She’s just focused on the babies. And scripture. Even if you ask a question about something, she’ll answer, ‘What does the Bible say?’ No matter what it is. I have a headache. She’ll say the reason’s in the Bible.” Fatimah rushed her words. “The only thing she does is send me fucking Gospel texts.”
Fatimah pulled out her phone to show me the latest. “‘Be healthy in the Lord and serve him in all your faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshipped beyond the river in Egypt,’” she read. “Come on. Like that has nothing to do with what I’m going through. It’s just copy, paste, send it to everyone, you know? Resend, forward.”
The next time I saw Dominique, she too was thinking a lot more about her biological mom. As she had predicted, her placement in the therapeutic home in Coney Island bombed. But while she lived there, she could walk by her mom’s old apartment every day, and Dominique had decided that mom should have been her answer. When she was placed with a new family in Queens, Dominique crossed adoption off her list of goals for the first time in her life. Even though her mother was long gone, Dominique wanted to hold out for the real thing, if only in her mind.
“I’ve been in five pre-adoptive homes, and I’ve never been adopted, so I decided to take adoption off my plan,” Dominique said, as we wandered around a makeup store near her new home, picking up fake eyelashes and bottles of glitter nail polish. This meant she had decided, like the other 80 percent of kids her age in ACS, that she would just age out on her own. “I still want a mom, but I realized God is not going to bless me because I ruined that relationship with my real mom. And honestly, since I took adoption off my list, I feel like I’ve been blessed with more. There isn’t the pressure to find adoption, and I’ve learned family is about blending in with people who love me.”
Dominique wasn’t sure if her new foster mom would love her, but without the stress to live with her forever, she had more hope. The first thing Dominique showed me was her new tattoo on her left hand, of a small butterfly taking flight. She’d had it done down the street.
“I didn’t think I liked butterflies, but subconsciously, I liked them, because I have them all over my room,” Dominique said. I noticed that her stutter, normally so prominent, seemed subdued. “I think they symbolize freedom, because I’ve never seen them standing still; they’re always flying. And I’ve always wanted that freedom—not as far as having space but as far as feeling like, ‘Dang, I’m loved.’ So I don’t have to think about anything. That’s freedom.”
Dominique admitted that the first butterfly she ever saw was actually “standing still.” It was in a box, when she was in second grade, and her teacher had brought it in as part of a lesson about the butterfly’s progress from caterpillar to chrysalis on up. But what impressed Dominique was the box.
“I felt like that,” she said. “Like I always had an obstacle surrounding me, keeping me from moving. I got this tattoo because I wanted to set down the box. Set down all of this pain, all of this hurt. Just let it go, so I could move on with my life.”
Dominique was hungry, so we left the makeup shop and the fast-food chains of Sutphin Boulevard to find something quieter and homier. Despite the winter weather, Dominique was wearing only moccasins on her feet, and her head, newly adorned with raspberry-colored hairpieces, was hatless. I thought she might be cold, but Dominique brushed me off. She liked to walk; she liked exploring new neighborhoods, and she was warm enough when she was moving.
“My mom was not perfect, but she did try,” Dominique said softly, once we had found a small Spanish diner and ordered rice and beans. A telenovela was blaring in the background, so it was difficult to hear her. “I’ve been in the system a long time, always looking for someone who could replace my m-m-mom, and no one has yet to. So now I’m like, maybe she was what I needed in the first place.”
Dominique’s stutter returned; it cropped up when she was angry, or remorseful. She said she wished she could turn back time. She was the one who made the call to ACS and turned her mother in. If she hadn’t done that, she said, maybe her mom could have continued to improve.
“It was me,” Dominique said earnestly into her rice. “It was me in my anger and me in my hatred of the situation of how she allowed my brother to get abused—it made me resent her and not really allow her to try to get back to where she could have been in our lives.”
So now, Dominique said as the waitress cleared our plates, she was trying not to speak up quite so much. Her quick mouth had ruined her chances with her own mother, and it had ruined her chances with the Greens. She was now consciously trying to stuff her feelings or, at least, not voice her fury at all the injustice she saw. But it was hard. She was feeling “phony,” and often “frozen.” To her friends, she said, “Don’t tell me what you do, because I don’t want to tell you something you don’t want to hear,” which was making her feel, for the first time in her life, like a false friend. And with her new foster mom, who called to check up on her “like twenty times a day,” Dominique also bit her tongue. The strategy led to a more peaceful existence, at least superficially, but Dominique admitted the loss. “I’m holing things up inside,” she said. “This mom doesn’t really understand me.”
Lei, the former foster kid who graduated from an Ivy League university, didn’t have to chase her mother down. Unlike Tonya, Fatimah, and Dominique, Lei had a perfectly competent mom; she just lived in China. And when Lei turned eighteen, her mother came to her.
By then, though, it was too late. Lei had already survived foster care for five years, and the mom she missed was the mom she knew in childhood. Her father had already died, and when her mother immigrated alone, Lei said she could hardly relate to her at all. “I feel like, to this day, my family still doesn’t understand what foster care really is. I feel like they think I just went to some hangout place,” she said. “As soon as I went into college, they were like, ‘You’re fine.’ But I was not fine. I felt like dropping out, withdrawing.”
Despite all of Lei’s accomplishments, there were just too many disconnects, too many parts of her life that didn’t fit together. She was at an Ivy League school, but there were no other kids like her there, nobody from foster care, nobody to understand what she’d endured. And then there was her mother, who took going to a good school as a given and expected her daughter to major in economics or business. “I come from an immigration family, so they wanted me to graduate with something where I could make money. They were not happy when I told them I wanted to be a youth worker. They were like, ‘Nonprofit, what’s that?’”
When we met at the Starbucks, Lei had accomplished her vision. She had been out of school for a year and was working at an agency in Brooklyn helping low-income teenagers make plans for their futures. But despite her e-mail quote about knowledge and humanity, Lei’s experiences had destroyed her faith in people. “I don’t trust anyone. Even my family, mmm-hmmm,” Lei said. “I felt so betrayed. They weren’t there for me when I needed them, and they pulled me down.”
So even Lei had to go back, to find the mom of her memory—the one who had been there for her way back when. About a year after I met Lei, she sent me an e-mail, to say hello. She still had the same quote on her signature line, but she had moved to Taiwan and was teaching English to school kids. She was doing fine, she said, adjusting to the heat and humidity, and to her new hectic schedule. She had moved back to the region of her childhood, where love had been constant and abundant. But she’d moved to a city she’d never seen, where she knew nobody, and nobody knew her, and nobody could break the reverie of what might have been.
Three
Release
We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it.
—Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
11
Fantasy Islands
EVENTUALLY ALL FOSTER CHILDREN, if they don’t go home or get
adopted, will be declared legal adults and released from the system. This is called “aging out.”
In New York, there are over six thousand adolescents under ACS supervision. At fourteen, these kids get to set their own “permanency planning goal”—meaning they, rather than their caseworkers or guardians, get to map their futures. If their biological families aren’t an option, they have two choices: they can continue trying for adoption, or they can give up on the whole family idea and opt for “independent living” as soon as they reach legal age. In 2009, ACS reported that 7 percent of the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds wanted to try for independent living; the rest were still vying for adoption or to return home. By the time they turned seventeen, though, they’d given up hope: only 6 percent were still asking for adoption; most of the rest had shifted their goal to independent living.
Most foster kids I know do not use the term independent living. They call it getting “discharged”—as though foster care were military service. And every year, the thousand or so youths “discharged” to the streets of New York City, even according to ACS, “must rely primarily on themselves.” They have nobody else to turn to.
ACS doesn’t track the whereabouts of its kids past their discharge date, but many don’t have the skills, or the money, or the education, or the support network to live on their own; it’s why so many end up homeless. And they don’t have the experience: 70 percent of these young people are discharged directly from group homes or institutions—places with strict rules that hardly mirror all the options and temptations of real life in New York City.
To bridge the gap between the authoritarian world of the institution and real life, where a foster kid has to suddenly be self-motivated, independent, and responsible, most states have created a supervised living arrangement for kids in their late teens. They’re often apartments or dorms, where kids live in clusters of twos or threes and learn to cook and clean and budget for themselves, with social workers checking up on them a few times a week.
